Mountain Biking Crested Butte

The last day we were here I was really struggling with filling my hiking void since we didn’t get to hike Aspen to Crested Butte. My son and husband wanted a bigger adventure. On a whim we decided to rent mountain bikes at https://crestedbuttesports.com/ and mountain bike down the trails. Insert wide eyed emoji here. Before I agreed to do this I made my husband and son walk the trails so I could get a feel for how steep it was and how the terrain was. I had never done this before and it seemed slightly terrifying. I’ve skied for years but this?!?!

These trails don’t look hard. they seem easy actually. I can do this......

This is a view above the ”easy” green trails.

Once we finished, I was like, okay, maybe this won’t be so bad. My husband, myself, my son and daughter got up early and rented our bikes and bought our lift tickets. These two things were more expensive than all the things we did on our trip combined. Roll window down, toss budget out.

We get to the lift, toss the front wheel up then hook it on the lift pretending like we've done this a thousand times. Turn around, sit down. The next 10 minutes or so was the calm before the storm. I love riding the lift, skiing or not. It’s peaceful and beautiful and leisurely.

Here is a more challenging trail that the lift went over. No thank you.

Then we get to the top and like the first time you ski down a trail (or worse) we look around and try to get our minds wrapped around what we are about to do. We see a sign that says green-beginners start here. Okay, we are beginners. See beginners do this. We all get ready to make our way down. My son and husband go first, then my daughter, then I go last. For some reason I feel safer going last. We go through the first couple of winding switchbacks. I can’t tell if I was breathing or not but I was definitely going back and forth from “Dear God” to “Oh Sh$*t”. I spent the entire time with my breaks on and letting off just enough to be moving. Emily hit a tree within minutes. She got up, dusted herself off and we kept going. The boys were pretty far ahead. They eventually waited for us and we took a break.

We all agreed it was way harder than we had expected. The most interesting thing to me was that the tires and shocks keep you from feeling all the rocks that the bike is going over. That is one of the things I was scared of. I didn’t want to hit a rock and lose my balance then fall. We kept going I kept screaming in my head. Why, why why did I say yes to this. I took several breaks out of fear mostly. Got called a scrub by a couple of little kids that passed me. I wanted to say “I don’t see your mom up here!” No, because she is smart. We got closer to the base of the mountain and went toward a very narrow but smooth path.

I thought to myself, this looks nice riding in a path surrounded by flowers. This should be easy. NO. The fact that it is narrow makes it harder to stay on the path especially when I was riding my breaks the whole time because I didn’t want to go too fast and fall. I fell into the beautiful flowers because I was going too slow. Go figure. We finally made it to the bottom 45 minutes later. Mainly because of me. The boys decided to ride again. Emily and I told the boys, thanks but no thanks. We are going to the souvenir shop. They went down a different trail and this time much faster without me slowing them down. When they finished though, my son was covered in dirt and they both had fallen off and had their share of bruises.

They were done after round two. We still had a long time left on our rental so instead of putting our tails between our legs and turning the bikes back in we decided to ride down hill to town. Obviously we all knew that going down hill meant we had to ride back up. We decided to go for it.

The down hill ride was fast and fun and like everything in CB, scenic and beautiful.

When we got to the bottom we passed by some of the most charming houses in the neighborhood next to town. We cooled off in the visitor center. It was pretty warm outside that day. We got mentally prepared to go up the hill. Staring it down. Telling ourselves we can do this. It was long and exhausting. My daughter was really close to having a meltdown but she stayed strong and just kept going. She said it reminded her of the time we hiked out of the Grand Canyon which was like a 2 miles stairclimber. We took lots of breaks and even walked our bikes part of the way as we got closer to the top. We watched as people flew down the hill smiling and laughing and thought to ourselves, just wait, the face we have on right now of pure regret will be you soon enough. We finally made it to the top and it started raining which felt amazing. We turned our bikes in and if nothing else, we felt very accomplished.

This was our last day though, so I told my husband, no naps today. We are going hiking......